Chile Forum

EEU, I certainly can believe what you are saying about individuals wanting to keep things to themselves. Especially when it comes to strange phenomonon.

I certainly had a part in the straying. My apologies for my part on this topic.

El Puelche that is an interesting quip about the beliefs on looking at the moon.
I would like to know more about these mythologies.

EMPACHADO

"uf, estas empachado...acuestate boca bajo para sacarte el empacho"

When i was camping with some friends near Icalma east of Temuco, i got really sick to the stomach. One of my friends told me i was empachado. (i think english equivalent would be 'all stopped up' or constipated). He would lay me down on my stomach and pull up on the skin and tissue or my lumbar back region and get it to pop. He said yea, because it "popped" you're empachado...but now you'll be better.

haha i'm not sure where that came from or how getting my lower back to pop would help my stomach out, but it's a belief.

Another crazy thing that my same friend would do is water witching...that was cool cuz it really worked and he's found around 80 different water sources for wells around the outskirts of temuco.

MACANUDO

This is a word used mostly by men over 50 years old...I do not know the origin of the word but it means something is "great"...so if you say to someone that the party is on for saturday at 6 they would respond with "macanudo!!!!" or ...hey I'll but that old cow of yours for 50 luca...."macanudo!!!"

Younger folks will not typicaly use this word as they would use instead..."super"...

ciao el puelche

PESADO

pronounced "pesaaa'o"

literal meaning is "heavy", but in chilenismo it mean's "aw, you lucky dog"

>>"i've got the whole week off and am gonna go to the beach"

>>"awww pesaaa'o.....i wanna go!"

P.S. i'm not sure if this is country wide, but was used frequently by all my friends in and around temuco....

I was thinking about all the slang for money...

una luca>>>a thousand pesos
una gabriela>>>>a five thousand peso bill
gamba...a cien peso coin ie cien pesos
a hundred thousand pesos can also be a "gamba"
un palo...a million pesos
una chaucha.....old slang for "centavos" when they had them but actually had reference to the coin itself.


general terms for money...

plata
lana
pan


Incidently all those going to CHile have all your dollars in good shape with no tears, marks, parts missing and even dirty old bills as the money houses will not take them...also the Colombian super bill (100usd bill) is out and series in AB CB are many times exchanged at lower exchange than others...

ciao, el puelche

PUCHA CHAI

you will hear chileans exclaim now and again "pucha!!!" and so it is ...its like darn it, or damn or crap!!!....

It comes from a town in the north that is goes by that name "Pucha Chai" and in pucha chai when its hot, its hot and cold when its cold etc

THis is not to be confused with "puta" which means "woman of low self-regard" but when said fast by a chilean sounds close...it cracks me up when then they say "Puta, huevon...." but thats another post

ciao, el puelche

EL PAGO DE CHILE...

Although the exact translation is not "no good deed goes un-punished" thats what it means..and relates to what alot of Chileans traveling, working or competing internationaly get....when they loose (or win)...its that feeling of un-gratefulness you get when you"ve accomplished something for the benefit of all those other than yourself...for the nation(its used in a more local way say for instance if a volleyball team goes from one city to another and looses and the bus driver that brought them, charges them a regualar fare to go back home...pre-sumably because he is the bus driver but essentialy because they lost the game and its a special type of CHilean payback...Bernardo O'ggins, the liberator of Chile, died in poverty, toothless, homeless and unknown in the streets of Lima, Peru...purportedly he had TB and sitting on the curb one day , begging for spare change, he fell over dead and lay in the street a day or two before they buried him....O'Higgins knew first hand what "el pago de Chile" was all about.

puelche out

CHASCON...CHASCONA


untidy, messy...unkept....unruly....disorganized....its really almost a planned messedupedness really...Chileans make for excellent rebels and chascon or chascona is only a person/s that excel in its occupation...its not dirty or unshowered as much as its...mixed up...and when done right its adorable in a girl and irristible for the girls to see a chascon...I knew a Chilean guy that would deliberately leave his tie askew so that the girls would come to "help" him out in straightening it up...he got alot of dates...if you've been to Nerudas house in isla negra...he didn't call it "la chascona" for nothing...and thats what it is for Chileans...its poetry incarnate, but only when done right...and when you see it done right you'll know....

ciao, puelche

In the Pelena region they do not say "Choa" so much. They say CHI-ITO.

I am working on collecting a few more of the local words, as Pelena and Futa have strong influences from Argentina and generally have been isolated completely from influences of Santiago and the Central region. Many of the words and expressions listed on this thread ( like "Po" ) will almost never be used in this region, and it instantly marks someone in a conversation as being from the outside.

The Spanish here is far slower, clearer, and more formal. Great for learning, because people have time to figure out what you are saying. They will talk to you all day if needed.

There is no high school in Futaleufu. So, teens are sent as far away as Puerto Mont to go to private schools in the winter (Yes, Futa is a real paradise. No teenagers!!! ). When they come back in the summer it is funny to hear how different they talk from everyone else in the town. After a month or so, their lingo has started getting more local again.

I hear 'po' quite a bit at the end of a sentence. I hear 'cachai?' a lot too. Today I heard 'chao pescado.'

What about the unique way chileans conjugate verbs sometimes?
I think a lot of the time it's more in the younger population.
I've only heard it in chile...It's somewhat similar to the vosotros conjugation in Spain but it's the "tu" form in chile.
here are some examples:

For 'ar' verbs in the 'tu', you drop the 's' and add the 'i'.

¿CÓMO ESTAI? (for como estas)

for 'er' verbs, if it ends in 'es', drop that and replace it with 'í'

¿OYE, TENÍ UNA GAMBA? (¿oye tienes una gamba?)
or
AY, NO TE PREOCUPÍ (ay, no te preocupes)

Kinda weird eh? I think it takes some mastering, too though, just like when to use 'poh'.

PENCA

this is the word for "bummer" or "crappy..."

You win the polla gol but loose the ticket on the way to cash it in "que penca!!!"

you get home and there was a party but no food is left..."que penca!!!"


ciao. puelche out

Tybombero wrote:What about the unique way chileans conjugate verbs sometimes?
I think a lot of the time it's more in the younger population.

Actually, I think those are examples of uneducated speech. If I remember correctly, 'estai' = estais. In uneducated (or very informal) speech, the ending 's' gets dropped or not fully pronounced. Another example would be the 'po' word. If you listen carefully, they're actually saying 'pos' but they're "eating" the 's' (not that 'pos' is educated - I think the actual word is 'pues')

I don't have a Spanish dictionary or a grammar book handy to check, but maybe next time you could ask your friends to write the words for you?
You could also compare the speech of, say, a bank manager or university professor. I'd bet they don't speak like that.

Language has a way of "marking" people - here, there and everywhere...

socal-lady wrote:

Actually, I think those are examples of uneducated speech. If I remember correctly, 'estai' = estais. In uneducated (or very informal) speech, the ending 's' gets dropped or not fully pronounced

Yeah you definately don't here your doctor talking to you like that. I think even more than uneducated, it's just plain slang. My friends would speak correctly half the time, and then whenever they felt like it, or if it just flowed in the conversation, they would come out with these pronunciations.

It very well may be that they're just shortening the spanish conjugation in the vosotros form (especially in chile where 50% of there words are cut short)...but then i don't know why they're using it in the "tu" context.

As far as them writing it...haha, well yeah, they can't spell half of the words in the spanish vocabulary so it seems they just spell everything phonetically and hence get a lot of the "ll" and "y" mixed up as well as "b" and "v". So i'm not sure if there is an accurate spelling for it if it's just slang. The "poh" i've seen it spelled as "poh, pu, po, bu"... again not sure if it's an actual word or just some made up slang.

Yeah. languages sure are facinating

I should specify when I say "they can't spell half of the spanish vocabulary", i'm talking about my specific friends who I write to frequently. I wasn't trying to make it sound like chileans in general can't spell.